Every major smartphone works the same way. You’ll find apps, web browsers, clean typography, and similar, intuitive iconography across them all. Eventually, you’ll land at a social app like Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, or Snapchat–and you’ll land there again and again, dozens of more times a day.

But this sort of digital homogeny has left an opening for the analog world, said Jake Barton, founder of the experience design firm Local Projects, when we visited his firm for our Studio Tours video profile.

“People crave human contact. [With] social media–even as it’s arguably social–we’d argue that you’re actually only talking to the same thing over and over: That’s the screen,” Barton says. “Creating things in physical space has never been more important. And if you can create something that really draws people together, the effect can be so much deeper than in a digital space alone.”